Megacities flooded by surging seas. Mountains bare of the glaciers that once perched on their craggy peaks. Ice sheets crumbling into the ocean. The seafloor carpeted in ghostly skeletons of dead coral reefs.
This isn’t the plot of a disaster movie; it is a realistic picture of the world we are heading toward as global warming ticks upward and the global appetite to tackle the climate crisis wanes, scientists are warning.
A series of reports over the past month have sketched a plausible portrait of our future, and the picture is grim.
Three decades of global climate action have slowed the rise of planet-warming pollution, but it is far from enough. The world is on track for catastrophic warming and, in an alarming twist, the worst impacts of the climate crisis are unfolding decades earlier than scientists predicted.
Countries agreed in Paris in 2015 to make every effort to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
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